This program explores the film work of the painter, abstract artist, engineer, animator and film artist Oskar Fischinger, with many examples of his work. Writer William Möritz and Fischinger’s widow Elfriede discuss his work with film animator and historian John Canemaker.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
This program presents excerpts from German plays written in the 1920s that illustrate tensions that contributed to the rise of Nazism. The plays are “Gas” by George Kaiser, “Hoopla! Such is Life!” by Ernst Toller, and “The Private Life of the Master Race” by Bertolt Brecht.
A nuclear awareness fan-film satire, from 1984, synced to “Life During Wartime” by the Talking Heads, created as an expression of dismay on that era’s trigger happy leaders. It traveled the world among like-minded films a generation ago, with recognition in Portugal, Tunis, Brazil, and around the US. The MPD awarded it the “Bill Barton Animation Film Award” in 1985.
An aging beauty queen reluctantly escorts her daughter and friends back to Paris, Texas — her home, which she mysteriously fled a decade earlier — to oversee a beauty pageant in this campy road dramedy.
Felipa, a first-generation American girl, dreams of becoming a teacher. Her first pupil is her uncle, who she tutors in English so he can get a driver’s license and a better job.
Big Joe is a lineman for the telephone company. Angel is a teenage migrant worker. They form an unlikely alliance and start a rose-growing business. At first wary of each other, they grow to trust and like one another. Eventually, Angel must leave the area when his father relocates the family in search of migrant work.
The elderly Veronika who lives alone has two resolves. The first is to collect sufficient money through her own labour, to be able to visit her only living relative, her son, in London. The second is to start cultivating her long-neglected vineyard. The lady, who has suffered greatly over the years, works with stubborn will and quiet serenity to achieve the goals she has set herself. Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay’s lyrical, documentary-style film received numerous awards at international film festivals.
In Istanbul, the Kurdish immigrants are constantly hassled by the cops. Mehmet is arrested for something he hasn’t done and beaten up in prison. Later, his new friend, Berzan, who scrapes a living selling music tapes from a barrow, is killed in police custody. Mehmet is determined to take Berzan’s body back to his village in the south. That is the coffin bit, which becomes a genuine adventure. A silent cry for freedom and peace, a movie that expresses the wish of people living peacefully together.